Elyments Wants to Replace Facebook and WhatsApp with a Made in India 'Super App'
Following up on the ban on a number of popular Chinese apps last week, the government of India has backed the launch of what is being called India’s indigenous ‘super app’ for social media activities. Called ‘Elyments’, the app was launched earlier today by the Vice President of India M. Venkaiah Naidu. Among its most attractive features, the app will reportedly be available in eight Indian languages, and offer features such as a social media content feed, a chat interface and options to make audio and video calls. The app is said to have been entirely made in India, and has been listed on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store by Sumeru Software Solutions – the promoters behind The Art of Living organisation’s smartphone applications.
Revealing details about the app on Twitter, Naidu said, “More than one thousand IT professionals, who are also the volunteers of the Art of Living, have together created an indigenous app named Elyments. It’s appreciable that the app will be available in eight Indian languages. India is an IT powerhouse and we have some of the world’s best-known names in this field. With such a huge pool of talented professionals, I feel there should be many more such innovations coming out in future.”
Naidu further made a call to turn “local” ventures and ideas into “glocal” projects, i.e. use technology opportunities to build services that would meet global standards.
India’s recent ban on 59 Chinese smartphone applications, including the virally popular ‘TikTok’, has opened up a void in the vernacular social media space that the likes of ShareChat, Roposo, Bolo Indya, Chingari and the likes are trying to fill. The move has further brought the ‘make in India’ push back into trends, of which The Art of Living’s Elyments app will be one. To convince users of the safety of usage, Sumeru has stated that all conversations on the app are end to end encrypted, and that the app is fully compliant with data storage laws of India, with the service’s data servers are stored locally.
While most reviews of the Elyments app at present seems to be positive, there are a number of reports that state that users are being unable to login to the app, suggesting that it still has teething bugs in the service. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if Elyments, which has been officially backed by India’s Vice President as an ideal example of a service made in India, manages to grow in user count and rival global giants such as Facebook and WhatsApp. After being in beta for a while, Elyments has so far seen over 1 lakh downloads on the Google Play Store.
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